Monday, February 2, 2009

My Japanese Coach cheat

Well, it looks like Ubisoft is giving out the cheat to people who call customer support and request it. A reader of this blog posted it as a comment to the entry titled "More My Japanese Coach News." I figure since Ubisoft is giving it out, I might as well make a full blog post detailing the cheat. If your copy of My Japanese Coach is sitting on your shelf collecting dust, then this should help breathe some new life into it.

Go to the dictionary and look up the word "cheat". Touch the "V" next to the verb to open the conjugation chart. Hold the L and R triggers for a few seconds. If done correctly, you will hear the word "cheat" in Japanese. The cheat has now been activated.

Now to use the cheat, you must return to the main menu, go to Options, then Sound. Pressing R will advance you 1 lesson, and pressing L will advance you to the beginning of the next lesson group (usually every 50 lessons).

Now beware, once this cheat has been activated, it is saved to your profile, and can't be turned off until you delete your profile. And there's no way to go back to previous lessons that you skipped over. Sure, you can visit the skipped lesson from the lesson map, but there's no lesson map once you get past lesson 100.

One last caveat...the cheat has always functioned properly in all testing that I have done, but, as Game Informer magazine says in every issue, "Cheat codes are buggier than Virginia in August." Although I don't anticipate any problems (other than the aforementioned permanent unlock), use the cheat at your own risk.

12 comments:

I have some suggestion for improvements if you ever make a new edition of My Japanese Coach.

My biggest problem with the game is that there's no way to make your own word lists. I have studied Japanese before, but since I have forgotten a lot I started from the beginning. Most of the words in the early lessons I already knew, but there were also some I didn't know. It was easy enough to "master" them in the lessons, but I wanted to practice those words more so that I really knew them. Unfortunately that was not possible. When you go to the games you only have the option between "Mastered" and "Open". There is now way to mark some of the words to make a custom list. So then I had to just play with all the words I had learned. But when you're getting really elementary words, and even kana(!), it quickly became a little anoying.

It should be possibly to make at least two custom word lists. One list you could make from the lessons. If there were some words at the end of a lesson that the user thought needed more practice, s/he could just click on it to add it to the custom word list. At the end of a game with the custom word list the user could just as easy remove words that s/he now really mastered.

The second word list you could make from the dictionary. That would be very useful if you for example were taking a Japanese course (at school, teach yourself books, etc), and could make a list of the words you wanted to practice.

The most useful games are Multiple Choice and Flash Cards. The problem is that you have alternatives. So even if you don't remember the right word, you can eliminate the wrong alternatives.

So I would like an alternative version of a Flash Card game. You're presented with a English word and a "Check" button. There's no timer or anything else. You can now say the word loud (or quietly if you're not alone), write it down in kana or try to write it with kanji, or whatever you want. Then you can click on "Check" and get the correct answer. The screen now shows a green and red button, for correct and wrong answer. When you click one of them you get a new word. At the end you can review what you got right and wrong. This game doesn't count for master points. Before you start the game you choose if you want to be presented with a English or Japanese word first. And you can choose between Short Game (10 words), Long Game (unlimited, you click on a button to end the game) or Time Limit (perhaps 3 or 5 minute. Then you can test yourself how many words you can get right in the time limit).

I would also like to have the option to get a English word and have to write the Japanese word with a kana keyboard (not romaji with a qwerty keyboard). The DS has a built in kana keyboard which works just fine.

If someone develops a good Japanese dictionary with flash cards game for the DS, I'll buy it right away. I would also like to get good lessons, but learning new words and having a good dictionary is such an important thing that that alone would make me happy :)

I'm looking forward to My Japanese Coach 2 which hopefully will have all these improvements and be even better than the first :)

wow, thanks for the cheat and thanks for posting about it on gamefaqs. I've been looking everywhere for a cheat that would let me skip some lessons in my chinese coach.

I'm curious about who came up with the games and how thoroughly they were tested, because to be honest some of them are pretty broken. like Spelltastic, maybe it's fine in the japanese version... I dunno

I'm glad you're enjoying the game. I haven't been working on games for a while because the game company I was at ran out of money. In May I left to work at TD Williamson and am still programming, but it's about as far away from games as you can get.

No. The Spanish PSP version was the only one we did. When I left, the iPhone versions were all the rage. I don't even think anyone from the original team is still there. But if Ubisoft wants another PSP game, I'm sure they'll find a way to resurrect the code base and make it.

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I've been married five years, and live in Lehi, Utah. I'm a video game programmer at Sensory Sweep, in Salt Lake City. I'm also a musician, with the piano as my main instrument. I also play the organ, and sing wherever I get the opportunity.